SEO of WordPress Blog

18. Nov, 2009 0 Comments

The 7 steps

1. Use WordPress! And get the necessary plugins.
2. What have you got, that others want?
3. Who do you want on your site?
4. Structure your content so it’s easy for engines…
5. Get analytics, see where you are going.
6. Work consistently for at least 6 months.
7. Socialise.

Step 1. WordPress and Plugins.

All in One SEO Pack: Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine Optimization.

Paginated Comments: Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of s … (if you get lots of comments)

WP-PageNavi: Pagination on index and archive pages.
Instead of one huge page, break it up with this plugin. Google typically only indexes the 1st 100KB of HTML, so break up your pages

WWW redirect: Make sure the engine only sees one version of your site i.e. http://www.mysite.com (and not the http://mysite.com)

Permalinks (wordpress core): Make Your content human friendly. Use this in permalink: /%category% %postname%-%post_id%.html (use a unique identifier so you can be picked up by Google news)

Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title () exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.

Categorization of content: Don’t mark the same post under more than a single category if possible, so you don’t get too much duplicate content.

Robots.txt
Tell the engines where you want them to go

Internal page redirections
Manage error pages, or redirect search engines from old posts to new ones

Step 2. What’s on offer?
• Is your content useful or entertaining?
• Do you love writing it?
• Have you got a niche you are prominent in?
• Would you read your content?
• Will you keep going even if no one visits?

Step 3. Who do you want here?
• Is your site a PR device?
• Do you want to make money from it?
• Is it just an ego thing?
Picture your reader and write for that person!
– A blog is a conversation, so write like you are directly speaking with that person. Visualize him or her.
– Remember, add in the words they would use to find you.

Step 4. Structure for Engines
• Think like a librarian…
– Books need labeling correctly
• The correct title
• Other categorization information
– Duplication is annoying
– Put the books in the right sections

Step 5. Google analytics
• Get Google analytics and Google webmaster console
• Look out for these key performance indexes:
– Absolute unique visitors per month
– Returning Visitors / Visitor loyalty
– Time spent on site per user
– Pages viewed per user
– Number of keywords your site has been accessed by
– Which are your big traffic phrases
– Proportion of traffic from:
• Engines (40-60%)
• Direct (20%)
• Referred from other sites (25%)

Step 6.
It’s going to take time…So I hope you love it.

Step 7. Get links
Search engines love links.
Rule of thumb: If the site is human managed and relevant, then its ok (it’s why general directories are worthless to you)
They look for signals that show the site is important = good relevant links
• Get commenting and contributing on relevant sites in your subject neighbourhood.
• Do the occasional link exchange
• Be remarkable, so people WANT to link to you.
• Put ‘signposts’ up on relevant sites (links pages)

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